[sane-devel] Ubuntu question

[Johnny Rosenberg]

2008/12/23 David R. Sky <davidsky at shellworld.net>

> Hi Johnny,
>
> Igor sounds like he's enthusiastic about Ubuntu, but I haven't used any
> version of Linux so far. I asked him whether there was Ubuntu scanner
> software which has the ability for the user to scan a photo and the software
> would crop the edges so the person wouldn't need to do this himself. Useful
> for me since I'm blind and want to scan some photos. Igor didn't know and
> suggested I ask you.


I'm sorry that this isn't going to be very short, but hopefully it won't
take all day to get though.
Well, I'm sorry to say that I'm not a guru yet, even if I learn almost every
day. One problem with Linux is still that the users are outnumbered by other
operating system users, which means that hardware manufacturers don't bother
to write drivers for Linux. I have used Ubuntu since summer 2007 and I am
absolutely not planning to go back, even though I still have a small
partition with Windows XP on one of my computers.
Most of what I know about Ubuntu are things that I need to know to do my
thing. I got both of our printers to work, the first one was very easy to
install, the second one was a little bit harder. The second one is a multi
machine which means that it also has a built in scanner, and unfortunately
there are no drivers for it that works with Linux, so I never got it to
work. I only scan documents anyway, so these days I use my digital camera
instead, which is a lot faster and the result is acceptable. I only need to
be able to read the text and that's no problem.
Therefor I have a very little experience in scanners, but there is a project
going on that's called SANE - Scanner Access Now Easy. They have a mailing
list, sane-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org, where you can ask questions about
scanner drivers and probably also scanner software.
If there is no scanner software that suits you, there might be another
solution: WINE. Wine is an acronym for Wine Is No Emulator. WINE is, to
simplify it a bit, a piece of software that can run exe files. That means
that you can run Windows software with Wine. Not everything works as it
should, but with a little luck your scanner program just might.
One thing that worries me a bit is that I am not sure if there are any good
stuff for blind people available for Linux. Well, I am sure there are some
software, but if it's not good enough I guess it would be annoying for you.
However I know there are some pretty good stuff for people who are not
completely blind, but I don't know if you are. If you are working with
photos, you can't be completely blind, are you?
And as with everything, there is a learning curve. Linux is not Windows and
shouldn't be, so you need to be patient and put some time to it, I guess. At
least if you want to be an advanced user. Some time will be needed to find
out what software you need. If the Windows software you need isn't available
for Linux, maybe there is something out there that does basically the same
thing but with another name and so on. Maybe you need two applications to do
the same work that a big commercial application for Windows does.
Of course you can have Windows and Linux installed on the same machine and
select one of them when starting up, so if you get stuck with Ubuntu you can
reboot to Windows to get your work done until the day that you realize that
you don't need Windows anymore.
Sorry for not being a Linux scanner guru, but maybe I at least provided some
useful info.
Johnny Rosenberg


>
>
> Thanks!
>
> David
>
> --
> David R. Sky
> http://www.shellworld.net/~davidsky/
>
>
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